FROM THE DIARY OF ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, LONDON, 1891
Today, it seems fair to conclude, was a most peculiar day. Earlier, I was warming my bunions against the hissing range in my surgery in Upper Walpole Street when there came an agitated rapping at the door.
Agitated rapping? Eminem wasnt due along for another 110 years, so who in the name of Aubrey Beardsley could this be? I padded, pantherlike, across the Persian rug - a picture of modish elegance in sock suspenders and butt plugs - and pulled open the door.
A blast of icy January air thick with snowflakes, dead leaves and granite-hard granules of horse dung blew into the room and made my antimacassars flutter. On the doormat, swaddled against the cold, lurked a bent old man.
When I say 'bent' I do not for one moment mean his sexual proclivities, although of course for all I then knew he may well have been a Pirate Who Sails The Stormy Seas. I refer merely to his cowering, abject, contorted posture, which prefigured the discovery of the DNA double helix by some 60 years.
"What is the meaning of this?" I thundered, smiting the wretch repeatedly across the occiput with a handy Malacca cane. Reconsidering, I remembered that I ran a surgery intended to offer succour and comfort to the sick and needy, so I bade the old fool to enter and showed him to the nearest divan.
"What appears to be the trouble?" I inquired blandly, adding: "You appear to have sustained some grievous contusions, as of one who has been coshed repeatedly by a costermonger who thoroughly enjoys his work."
"Oh sir," said his mouth hole, "you have to come and see this." He gestured urgently towards the street, and something about the earnest entreaty in his eyes made me fart silently. I pulled on my cavalry twill trousers, screwed my monocle firmly into my socket and strode purposefully into Upper Walpole.
A large crowd was gathered at one end of the street . a motley collection of jackaknapes and hobbledehoys, urchins, vagabonds and wastrels. Yet the nearer I strode, I began to perceive that every man jack of them was capering strangely, as if in the grip of some febrile delirium. These ragamuffins were all flapping their arms slowly, as if to ascend into the upper air, and their knees shot repeatedly skywards as though to bruise random chins. Their eyes, meanwhile, were China white, entranced, and each throat ululated in unknown tongues.
I began to perceive music, of a singularly debased and unprecedented nature, and pushing through the swooning crowd I saw that it was being produced by an unseemly quartet of apparently sub-normal oafs. I had never heard the likes of this sound before. It permeated my every pore like a bath of Kennomeat, and set my very loins aflame with the urge to procreate.
I shook my head to clear it of this infernal, Mephistophelean, spellbinding, sinuous melody, but it was of no use. A mendicant with the face and breath of a gargoyle sidled up and whispered in my ear: "Tis Gothic Chicken, my lord - resistance is pointless and beyond the realms of earthly possibility".
My vision began to swim, my limbs jerked of their own volition and maniacal laughter - mine own - filled my ear chasms. I gave myself over entirely to the void as the music grew louder, stranger and ever more reverberant.
I woke up on Beachy Head some considerable time later, naked as a bath bun, daubed all over my torso with flowers, eyes, clock faces, arcane symbols and a detailed map of the emergent London Underground. My trousers were later found and detonated in The Strand.
As I say, a most peculiar day.
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